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See more here. 5 years ago Valve released Proton forever changing Linux gaming By Liam Dawe - 21 August 2023 at 11:08 am UTC | Views: 36,378 Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now. The problem: before, during and just after the original Steam Machine push developers just weren't porting many games to Linux, and on the whole really when you look back Linux gaming was in a period of mostly stagnation. Nothing much was happening. A lot of the early porting work that came along was slowly dying off since the Steam Machines didn't provide the boost Valve and Linux gamers were hoping for. Originally, "Steam Play" simply meant you could buy a game on Steam and get access to all versions of it. So if you purchased a game on Windows, you could play it on Linux if it had a Native Linux version (same again for macOS). Clearly though, that wasn't enough for what Valve had planned. So if Valve wanted to make Linux a better platform for people to actually use it, they needed something more. Popular games needed to be able to run on Linux if more people were to use it, because what good is a platform for gaming if tons of the most played games weren't compatible? As Valve saw with the Steam Machines (not the only reason of course) it doesn't end well. I remember being sat in my office at the time, going over my TODO list of various articles and games to cover, planning the week ahead. Ready to then probably go to bed and then BAM -- out of nowhere this announcement comes along from Valve that basically said "you're going to be hella busy, better get a lot of coffee". Valve had partnered up with CodeWeavers and Proton was the answer. Proton being the name Valve gave to their fork of Wine with a bunch of added extras, and it has changed Linux gaming forever. Steam Play is more than just Proton though, be sure to read my full Steam Play Proton guide. Side-note: John Carmack (id Software / Oculus VR / Keen Technologies) even thought Wine was the solution back in 2013. Of course Proton wouldn't have been possible without all the many years of work that went into the Wine project in the first place, and everyone who contributed to Wine should be applauded for their effort. Valve has funded a lot of extra work though to get things like DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for the translation from Direct3D to Vulkan into a state where performance can be really great! Valve also funds work on Linux graphics drivers, Linux kernel work and the list goes on. Just how much has Proton changed things though? Well, we certainly wouldn't have the Steam Deck if it wasn't for Proton. There's no way Valve would have released their handheld without as many games as possible, clearly learning their lesson on the failure of the Steam Machines. But as we all know, the Steam Machines burned so Proton and the Steam Deck could rise from the ashes. Proton just makes a lot of sense. It didn't take long for Valve to expand Proton to go initially from a few select Valve-approved titles, to being able to run anything we choose to try with it. From there, Linux gaming just seemingly exploded. And then eventually we saw why Valve made Proton with the Steam Deck announcement coming less than three years later in July 2021. When you look at the crowd-sourced reports on ProtonDB over 11,000 titles are reported to work by multiple people. It's a small fraction of Steam's overall game count but ProtonDB relies on people actually going and writing a report. Valve's own Deck Verified rating system just for the Steam Deck hit plenty of milestones since the Steam Deck's release too, now having over 10,000 titles rated to be Playable or Verified. Although both ProtonDB and Deck Verified include a mixture of Native Linux releases and Windows games run with Proton. The point is - being on Linux now for a gamer means quite often a huge amount of your games do actually "just work". It's almost magical. The real number of games playable on Linux will never be truly known though, because on Steam there's many tens of thousands of games and a lot of them will likely "just work" with Proton if they don't have a Native Linux build available...and many more are releasing every week. This is a truly incredible place to be in. When you think about Linux and Steam Deck together having just less than a 2% user share on Steam overall -- these are some insane numbers for game compatibility for a niche platform. Thanks to Proton, I've been able to discover a ton of new favourite games, some I would never have played before. Games like Deep Rock Galactic, God of War, Death Stranding, Baldur's Gate 3, Brotato, Beat Saber and so on. You get the idea, there's a truly ridiculous selection of games available and at times it's a little paralysing scrolling through my Steam Library deciding what to play -- a delightfully annoying problem to have huh? [1829151985]Pictured - Baldur's Gate 3, shot taken on Kubuntu Gamers using Linux (be it desktop or Steam Deck) in 2023 are now in a place where they can get excited alongside friends who use Windows or traditional consoles, because they know there's a good probable chance at release that whatever new exciting game coming out will work without much trouble. Proton is far from perfect though and it does mean in a few ways that Valve, CodeWeavers and everyone else working on it are playing catch-up with Microsoft on compatibility and whatever changes Microsoft suddenly decides to announce that affects gaming. That, and how many different ways game developers can abuse various APIs to do things in weird ways. Valve and co are a dedicated bunch though, constantly fixing up issues from AAA games like ELDEN RING where Valve quickly worked to implement optimizations, same again for problems with Dead Space to the likes of PooShooter: Toilet Invaders (what a fun highlight that was eh?). There's also the constant third-party launcher breakage, that Valve are also fixing up each time it happens. Valve produce updates to Proton constantly to improve compatibility, with over 300 revisions to the main changelog (although some a minor text corrections) it's clear to see how much work goes into it. With various new main versions of Proton through 4, 5, 6, 7 now onto 8 and multiple updates to Proton Experimental almost every month. So here's to Proton, the magnificent tech that allows playing all kinds of games across Linux systems from desktop to Steam Deck and wherever else you decide to stick Linux. Nice one Valve. Cheers. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Steam Deck, Steam Play, Editorial, Misc, Steam, Valve, Wine 33 Likes Share Share to Mastodon [twitter] [reddit] [facebook] [telegram] About the author - Liam Dawe author picture I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon. See more from me Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month: * Steam Beta updated with Indonesian support, 4K high quality streaming preset * Steam is having a festival for Visual Novels until August 14th * The top Steam Deck games for July 2023 has DAVE THE DIVER number 1 30 comments Page: 1/3>> Go to: [1] Quote This [Debian]dpanter about 12 hours ago * Link [dpanter356] View PC info * Mega Supporter * Steam * YouTube * twitch 5 years! Feels like Valve time, but good. :) 9 Likes, Who? [Mint]Linux_Rocks about 11 hours ago * Link [Linux_Rock] View PC info * Steam * YouTube * twitch * gogprofile To protect your privacy, external media requires approval to load. Source: www.techcrunch.com View cookie preferences. Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again Direct Link 5 Likes, Who? [Mint]Pengling about 11 hours ago * Link [Pengling49] View PC info * Supporter Proton lets me play the modern Bomberman games on Linux, and therefore it is Pengling Approved. [grin] Seriously, though, after I left consoles behind just shy of two years ago Proton has opened up a whole new world of content on the OS that I was already using for the last 16 years. Until then, I didn't even know it existed, or even that there was a Linux version of Steam (I was only super-distantly aware of the Steam Machines, and misunderstood the reason for their failure - I had perceived it as being due to redundancy, since consoles and self-built PCs already did that job). In those two years alone I've seen things go from "This Proton thing is like magic!" to "Steam Deck is coming soon" to "Oh look, a new Windows release runs better on Linux at launch than on Windows" to, most recently, "Cool! Devs are now making Linux-specific fixes even without native builds!". Valve is playing a very long game here, and I'm very interested in seeing where it goes next. [smile] Thanks to all involved in making things what they are right now! 12 Likes, Who? [Manjaro]a0kami about 11 hours ago * Link [a0kami760_] View PC info * Steam * twitch * mastodon I'll never forget Cheese's overview of the Linux gaming ecosystem back then. I felt so happy and relieved, then applied to Feral and everything went haywire, for the better however. I'll never be able to conveniently express my gratitude to neither Feral Interactive or Wine,DXVK,VKD3D-Proton teams and contributors or Valve or even the whole community, thank you so much. We made it possible and it's just the beginning. Now, sure the Steam Deck helped, and Deckard's going to be insane, but we just need a few more linux native cross-platform gamedev tools so we'd get a whole lot more native games. I place my bets on Godot, we'll see how it goes from there. 5 Likes, Who? [Arch]Turkeysteaks about 11 hours ago * Link View PC info * Steam Oh man, can't believe it's been 5 years already I remember trying to get warframe to work on linux over the course of a few years prior to proton. Always still somewhat broken, and eventually gave up on it to play other games. Now, it's click and play (though the curse of the 1000+ library; I still don't play it!) as are almost all my games. I used to spend hours on each game to get it to work, and now I feel I am far more tech illiterate than I used to be simply because I have not *needed* to tinker far in depth for any game in the past couple years. The steam deck too, that as a product is mindblowing to me and I love mine so much. Excited to see how it carries on moving forwards. 5 Likes, Who? [Kubuntu]CatKiller about 11 hours ago * Link [CatKiller4] View PC info * Supporter Plus "People don't realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior." -- Gabe Newell, 2012. 9 Likes, Who? [Debian]whizse about 11 hours ago * Link [whizse375_] View PC info * Supporter Happy fifth anniversary to Proton and Valve, and a big thank you to Liam and GoL for the fantastic coverage over the years! 7 Likes, Who? [Arch]lejimster about 11 hours ago * Link [lejimster9] View PC info * Steam I remember testing the early versions of proton when it first was announced. I was messing around with The Witness and the performance had dropped 50% from an early proton release. It was soon discovered they had accidentally released a debug version of proton. While the wine devs deserve a lot of credit, Vulkan and dxvk was the real game changer in terms of performance. So many titles run at 90+% of native because of dxvk and Vulkan titles often run better on Linux than they do Windows. 7 Likes, Who? [Ubuntu]Ehvis about 10 hours ago * Link [Ehvis144_a] View PC info * Supporter Plus * Steam Quoting: lejimsterWhile the wine devs deserve a lot of credit, Vulkan and dxvk was the real game changer in terms of performance. So many titles run at 90+% of native because of dxvk and Vulkan titles often run better on Linux than they do Windows. I'd say this is the key as well. DXVK was a major leap as it demonstrated how well Vulkan could be applied to D3D translation. 3 Likes, Who? [EndeavourO]StoneColdSpider about 10 hours ago * Link [StoneColdS] View PC info Proton was one of the main reasons I finally ditched Windows....... And I was not disappointed..... Proton has been really damn good........ So if you want to blame anyone for me hanging around here annoying you all....... Its Lord Gabens fault...... 5 Likes, Who? 1/3>> While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on: Reward Tiers: # Patreon. Plain Donations: # PayPal. This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone with no article paywalls. We also don't have tons of adverts, there's also no tracking and we respect your privacy. Just good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue! You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you! 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